The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the National Book Award Finalist Domenico Starnone comes a new novel about childhood, memory, obsession, and the fictions we live by.
Children can be cruel, and children can love as passionately and obsessively as adults. These two observations combine, igniting the imagination of Italy’s greatest contemporary novelist and producing a seemingly candid novel that belies remarkable psychological depths and infinite degrees of enchantment.
Imagine a child, a daydreamer, one of those boys who is always gazing out windows. His adoring grandmother, busy in the kitchen, keeps an eye on him. The child stares at the building opposite, watching a black-haired girl as she dances recklessly on her balcony. He is in love. And a love like this can push a child to extremes. He can become an explorer or a cabin boy, a cowboy or castaway; he can fight duels to the death, or even master unfamiliar languages. His grandmother has told him about the entrance to the underworld, and he knows the story of Orpheus’s failed rescue mission. He could do better, he thinks; he wouldn’t fail to bring that dark-haired up from the underground if she were dead, and it only he had the chance.
A short, sharp, perfectly styled and unforgettable novel about love, desire, memory, and death by the Strega Prize-winning Italian author of Ties and International Booker Prize-longlisted author of The House on Via Gemito.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this deeply affecting story of familial and romantic love, Starnone (Trust) illuminates a boy's life in Naples. Seduced by the legend of Orpheus and his grandmother Nanni's terrifying tales of the underworld, nine-year-old Mimi watches from his window as an unnamed girl pirouettes on her balcony. He fantasizes her as his Eurydice, and dreams of rescuing her from the darkness. The girl represents for him everything he is not and does not have: she is joyful while he is unhappy, she speaks an elegant Italian with her Milanese parents rather than the Neapolitan dialect of his household, and her sunny balcony is full of flowers, whereas his windowsill has only the dirty rag from Nanni's mop. As Mimi comes of age, he duels with his best friend, Lello, for the affections of "the girl from Milan," who leaves for summer vacation and never returns. At university, he reluctantly reconnects with Lello and learns the truth about the girl who has haunted him since childhood. Full of beauty and insight, Starnone's narrative contrasts youth and old age, education and natural wisdom, dreams and reality. This won't be easily forgotten.
